Former LA Times journalist Jack Nelson dies at 80

WASHINGTON – Jack Nelson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter who covered the civil rights movement and the Watergate scandal for the Los Angeles Times and was the paper's Washington bureau chief for 20 years, died Wednesday. He was 80.

Nelson, who had pancreatic cancer, died at his home in the Washington suburb of Bethesda, Md., said Richard Cooper a family friend and longtime Times associate.

Nelson spent more than 35 years with the Los Angeles Times, stepping down as its chief Washington correspondent in 2001. He joined the Times in 1965 and in 1970 began working in its Washington bureau. He was bureau chief from 1975 to the end of 1995.

As a reporter with The Atlanta Constitution in 1960, he won the Pulitzer Prize for local reporting for exposing malpractice and other problems at the 12,000-patient state mental hospital in Milledgeville, Ga.

One of Nelson’s best stories, I could read it over and over again:

Reagan Wins Landslide Victory

By Jack Nelson - Los Angeles Times - November 5, 1980

Republican Ronald Reagan was elected the nation’s 40th President Tuesday in a stunning landslide over President Carter, sweeping every region of the country and cutting deeply into voting blocs that supported Carter in 1976.

Carter conceded defeat at 6:53 p.m. PST, more than an hour before the California polls closed. Choked with emotion, the Democratic incumbent called on his supporters to unify behind President-elect Reagan to solve the problems still before us.

An hour earlier, Carter had called Reagan to congratulate him on his victory, just as Reagan was leaving his Pacific Palisades home to go to dinner.

Reagan, beaming but striking a serious tone, later told a cheering throng of supporters at the Century Plaza that he had never had a more humbling moment in my life.

With his wife, Nancy, looking on, the former California governor said, I consider the trust you have given me sacred and I give you my oath I will do the utmost to justify your faith.

Two Major Factors
Until the final weekend of the campaign, polls had reflected a tight race. But Carter’s handling of the Iranian hostage situation and his performance in the televised debate with Reagan one week before Election Day apparently turned off large numbers of undecided voters. An ABC News survey of voters as they left the polling booths showed that these two factors more than any others accounted for people siding against Carter in the last week of the campaign.

With near-final returns tabulated from all regions, Reagan had carried 40 states with 462 electoral votes, or 192 more than the 270 electoral votes needed for victory.

Carter carried only five states plus the District of Columbia with 45 electoral votes.

Rep. John B. Anderson (R-Ill.), running as an independent, carried no states. He fared so poorly in the popular vote and Reagan piled up such a huge margin in most states that Anderson was not a factor in the outcome.

With 88% of the nation’s precincts reporting, Reagan had 51% of the vote, Carter 42% and Anderson 6%.

Reagan’s sweeping victory helped carry greater Republican strength to Congress as GOP challengers defeated at least six Democratic senators, including the 1972 Democratic presidential nominee, George S. McGovern of South Dakota.

Reagan, appearing at his Los Angeles victory rally at 9 p.m., said Carter had been most gracious in their phone conversation and had pledged the utmost in cooperation in the transition that will take place in these coming months.

Moving quickly to arrange for an orderly transfer of power from Carter, the Reagan campaign staff plans to open a transition office in Washington Thursday. The office, under the direction of Edwin Meese, Reagan’s chief of staff, will set priorities, work on a federal budget for fiscal 1982, and begin preparations for the naming of 2,500 presidential appointees.

Plan for Tax Cut
One of Reagan’s first acts after assuming office will be to send Congress his plan for a 30% tax cut over three years, a top Reagan adviser said. The President-elect and his economic advisers will meet Nov. 14 to map basic economic strategy for his Administration.

Carter, flanked by his wife, Rosalynn, and numerous White House officials and Cabinet members, conceded defeat beneath a huge American flag in a Washington hotel ballroom where a victory celebration had been planned.

I promised you four years ago that I would never lie to you, so I can’t stand here tonight and say it doesn’t hurt, the President said.

Early Projections
A band played Hail to the Chief and Happy Days Are Here Again, the traditional Democratic song, but many women and some men in the audience blinked back tears.

The people of the United States have made their choice and, of course, I accept their decision, Carter said. I have a deep appreciation, however, of the system that allows the people to make their decision.

Long before the polls closed in California at 8 p.m., Reagan was projected as the winner in enough crucial states to assure his election. One network projected him as the winner at 5:45 p.m.

A philosophical conservative who served two terms as California’s governor from 1967-75, Reagan first began seeking the presidency in 1968only two years after being elected governor in a landslide. He was defeated for the Republican nomination in 1968 and again in 1976, but won it handily this year in a series of primary victories over several Republican candidates, including former U.N. Ambassador George Bush, the man he chose to become his running mate and the new vice president-elect.

Reagan is the first actor and first divorced person, as well as the oldest man, ever to be elected President. He will turn 70 on Feb. 6, about three weeks after his inauguration.

Third Californian
He also is the first native of Illinois, as well as the third Californian to be elected President. The other Californians also were Republicans Herbert Hoover and Richard M. Nixon.

Carter, a former Georgia governor, became the first elected President to fail to win reelection since Hoover was defeated by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 at the height of the Depression.

Reagan ran an aggressive campaign against Carter, the first Democratic President to run for reelection during a recession, and attacked him as an incompetent whose economic policies had failed. Reagan accused the President of plunging the nation into the recession, which many observers believe ended shortly before the election, and of failing to halt a spiraling inflation rate.

Carter was hurt, according to surveys of voters as they left the polling booths, by the inflation rate, his handling of foreign affairs, the Iranian hostage situation, the perception that the nation’s defenses had deteriorated and his campaign tactics personally attacking Reagan.

In view of polls just before the election, nearly all of which showed Reagan and Carter only two or three percentage points apart, the size of Reagan’s victory margin was particularly stunning.

Even in states that Carter carried, he did not do as well as he did in 1976 against President Gerald R. Ford. In Carter’s home state of Georgia, for example, with most of the ballots tabulated, Carter was winning 59%, compared to the 67% vote he got in 1976.

In his 1976 victory over Ford, Carter carried 10 of the 11 states of the Old Confederacy, but late returns Tuesday night showed him winning four at the most.

Disenchantment with Carter, more than love for Reagan, apparently accounted for Reagan’s margin of victory. Polls showed that only about two-thirds of the people who said they voted for Carter four years ago said they also voted for him Tuesday.

Reagan fared as well as Carter among union members, a traditionally Democratic group, and did better than the President among another traditionally Democratic group, Catholics.

Born-again Christians, a group that supported Carter in 1976, favored Reagan this time.

Women, presumably because of the war and peace issue and Reagan’s opposition to the equal rights amendment, split about evenly between the two candidates.

The only voting groups Carter managed to hold on to were the minorities, blacks, Latinos and Jews. And an ABC News poll showed Reagan and Anderson cutting deeply into the Jewish vote. For the first time since the 1930s, the Democratic presidential candidate appeared to be winning less than a majority among Jewish voters.

Polls showed that voters who did support Carter generally cited as their reasons for doing so his stand on war and peace and his concern for the elderly, the poor, minorities and equal rights for women.

Inflation, leadership, and ability to get the job done and the need for a change were reasons most often cited by voters for supporting Reagan.

Patrick Caddell, Carter’s pollster, said he was convinced that the weekend developments in the Iranian hostage situation had badly damaged Carter’s chances of reelection.

Caddell said he had taken six nationwide surveys of voter opinions since Friday and up until Sunday the polls showed a neck-and-neck race.

Begins to Slip
But as soon as the Iranian parliament endorsed the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s four demands for the release of the hostages, Caddell said, Carter’s support began to slip dramatically. By Sunday, Carter had slipped five points behind and by election eve he was 10 points back and it just kept on hemorraging, Caddell said.

The hostage situation, Caddell said, was not critical by itself, but was a catalyst for the public’s general frustration with the way things were going in the country.

Last week’s debate also was a powerful factor. Even though many political observers thought Carter had won it on substance, polls showed that the public thought Reagan had won and this perception gave his campaign a shot of adrenalin at just the time it showed signs of losing momentum.

Carter’s cold and aloof manner and his slashing attack on Reagan during the debate backfired. And even before the debate, the President already had tarnished his most valued political image, that of a good and decent man, with attacks portraying Reagan as a racist and a warmonger.

The President faced an uphill battle for reelection from the moment he won the hotly contested Democratic nomination from Sen. Edward M. Kennedy after several bitterly contested primaries and a fight at the Democratic National Convention in August.

In Reagan, Carter faced a candidate who had not only a solid base in the West but enormous popular appeal in the traditionally conservative South.

And in the end, Carter spent most of his remaining resources trying to shore up his own Southern base and seeking to hold on to the Midwestern and Northeastern states that he had carried in his narrow victory over Ford in 1976.

Neither Popular
Throughout the highly negative fall campaign, Carter and Reagan each sought to make the other candidate the issue a strategy based on polls that showed that neither man was very popular.

Reagan called the President incompetent and pointed out that inflation and unemployment rates had soared since the election of Carter, who had campaigned on a pledge to reduce both. In fact, polls after the 1976 election showed that about one-fourth of the Carter voters said they preferred him over Ford because of inflation and unemployment.

Reagan also accused Carter of allowing the nation’s defenses to deteriorate and promised that he would substantially increase defense spending.

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